Using foreach to perform an action on a range of observations

[Christina Pastoria]

I'm pretty new to Stata and have been struggling with something that I know shouldn't be this difficult. I am trying to reverse geocode a dataset of 14,000 observations, but can only evaluate 2,500 observations per day for free. I already did the first 2,500 and am now trying to do the next 2,500. I can't figure out how to write a loop so that the command executes over observations 2,500-5000. Right now, I'm just testing the logic by trying to display the values of variable 'latitude' for observations 2501-2506.

This is what I have been trying:

foreach i of list latitude 2501/2506 {
2. di `i'
3. }

And I'm getting an invalid syntax error.

I also tried

foreach i in latitude 2501/2506 {
2. di latitude
3. }

For this one, it returns the latitude value of observation 1 twice.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

[Andrew Musau]

forval i= 2501/2506{
    list latitude in `i'
}

or with display

forval i= 2501/2506{
    di latitude[`i']
}

[Rich Goldstein]

in your first try, you used invalid syntax as Stata told you; please review

help foreach

to see what is valid

in your second, you never used the "i"

it is not clear to me what you are trying to do but you may find using forval easier; see

help foval

more, here is a guess:

foreach i of numlist 2501/2506 {
di latitude if _n==`i'
}

or

forval i=2501/2506 {
di latitude in `i'
}

note that either "in" or "if" can be used in either command - I just wanted to show each

[Nick Cox]

Unfortunately, in and if qualifiers can't be combined with display as Rich Goldstein suggests in #3. You could use subscripts as in #2 but to see values in the example given

list latitude in 2501/2506

seems much simpler to me .